Personal computer systems are well known in the art. They have attained widespread use for providing computer power to many segments of today's modern society. Personal computers (PCs) may be defined as a desktop, floor standing, or portable microcomputer that includes a system unit having a central processing unit (CPU) and associated volatile and non-volatile memory, including random access memory (RAM) and basic input/output system read only memory (BIOS ROM), a system monitor, a keyboard, one or more flexible diskette drives, a CD-ROM drive, a fixed disk storage drive (also known as a “hard drive”), a pointing device such as a mouse, and an optional network interface adapter. Examples of such personal computer systems are International Business Machine Corp.'s (IBM's) PC 300, ThinkCentre, ThinkPad, Aptiva, and IntelliStation series.
The use of mobile computing devices, such as notebook PCs, personal digital assistants (PDAs), sophisticated wireless phones, etc., has also become widespread. Mobile computing devices typically exchange some functionality or performance when compared to traditional PCs in exchange for smaller size, portable power, and mobility.
The widespread use of PCs and mobile computing devices in various segments of society has resulted in a reliance on computer systems both at work and at home, such as for telecommuting, news, stock market information and trading, banking, shopping, shipping, communication in the form of hypertext transfer protocol (http) and e-mail, as well as other services. Many of these functions take advantage of the communication abilities offered by the Internet. Such connectivity has facilitated unprecedented collaboration and sharing of information between individuals, both within organizations and outside organizational structures. This collaboration has resulted in individuals having access to and sharing vast amounts of information, often in the form of electronic documents.
Electronic documents are digitized documents that contain text, graphics, photographs, etc., and can be read by various computer systems. Electronic documents may contain text or graphics, and a wide variety of file formats have been used, such as Portable Network Graphics (PNG), Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), Tag Image File Format (TIFF), Microsoft Word (DOC), etc. Other file formats capable of handling text and graphics include Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Adobe Systems Inc.'s Portable Document Format (PDF). For many applications, electronic documents, particularly PDF documents, have supplanted printed material for the dissemination of information, as many journals, newsletters, books, articles, etc., and now distributed either exclusively or non-exclusively in electronic form.
While electronic documents possess improved qualities in many ways over hardcopies, such as cost, easy of distribution, and time to prepare, disadvantages of electronic documents when compared to paper documents do exist. One deficiency of electronic documents is that it is difficult to find the most interesting or useful part of an electronic book or other document. With paper books, individuals may observe which pages are the most worn or the pages to which the book naturally opens due to frequent reading of those pages. One can easily discern which book in, say, a library is the most useful based on its wear, and one can also often find the most useful part of the book by noting the wear caused by frequent reading. Further, a user may visibly tab the most important pages of a book. Because of the virtual nature of an electronic document, however, electronic documents fail to provide such indications of frequently-read or particularly useful sections of the document.
There is, therefore, a need for an effective system to determine electronic document usage. More particularly, there is a need to aggregate usage statistics of different versions of an electronic document to increase the utility and reliability of the usage statistics and to enable a user to readily find the most frequently used sections of an electronic document, or the most frequently used electronic document in a library of electronic documents.